This came home to him when he sat with her again in the room in which her late aunt's conversation lingered like the tone of a cracked piano.

She tried to make him forget how much they were estranged, but in the very presence of what they had given up it was impossible not to be sorry for her.

He had taken from her so much more than she had taken from him.

He argued with her again, told her she could now have the altar to herself; but she only shook her head with pleading sadness, begging him not to waste his breath on the impossible, the extinct.

Couldn't he see that in relation to her private need the rites he had established were practically an elaborate exclusion?
She regretted nothing that had happened; it had all been right so long as she didn't know, and it was only that now she knew too much and that from the moment their eyes were open they would simply have to conform.